Hillbilly Truffle

Continued (page 5 of 6)

*****

michaels has four truffle orchards—he likes to refer to them as "tranches," for no reason other than he likes the sound of the word, one used in moneyed circles to designate a slice of a financial instrument. It's another rare appearance of that almost entirely suppressed streak of intellectual affectation. He buys trees or he nurtures his own seedlings, and he inoculates the roots himself, adding soil mixed with chopped-up bits of black truffles that contain the precious spores that will develop into more of them. The result is a model symbiotic relationship, the tree and the truffle in the soil, assisting each other with nutrients and water. He says getting the spores to colonize the roots is the simplest part of the job. "It's not rocket science. It's not third-grade science. Thousands of species of fungus grow on the roots of a tree. What we are doing is giving the truffle a head start."

He planted his first orchard twenty-five miles from his home, in 1999. It consists of ninety hazelnut trees, on land he doesn't own, a handshake deal with a friend. A year later came the "home orchard," the one in his backyard, and the site of his first success. Both of those are planted with hazelnut trees. To fight off eastern filbert blight, he allows the trees to mature not in a stately upright manner but more like bushes, so that new shoots are always replacing dying ones. Next came 1,000-plus trees a few miles away at a spot known as Jockey Creek, where we are headed with Jim Sanford and Tom the truffle dog. (Michaels has a fourth orchard of 900 trees, planted in 2003.) The third and the fourth orchard are a mixture of hazelnut and two kinds of oak—the hairy oak and the pedunculate oak. You ask Tom Michaels about trees, the information keeps coming, although I received a warning from Blizzard that it could get worse. She said to me of her scholarly boyfriend, "Don't get him started on corn. He'll be talking about whacking enzymes all afternoon."

It is a bright day in early February, and Michaels, Sanford, and Tom the truffle dog are going to work. First they stop to show me the part-cinder-block, part-tin, part-wood falling-down structure that Michaels describes as "the ugliest shed in Tennessee." It contains sacks of hydrated lime for carrying out acid adjustments in the soil, and Tom begins his workday by peeing on the sacks. Sanford shouts a command in Italian, and the dog is off.

The Lagotto Romagnola is small, friendly, and energetic, with a tufted coat that makes it look like a cross between a poodle and a Berber carpet. Tom, who has a brown head and a white body with brown patches, is relentless in his pursuit of truffles. Says Michaels, "That dog can smell through snow, I swear. He smelled through ice in January. He was saying to us that the truffle was there, but he couldn't paw through the ice to get it. We got a shovel, pulled away the ice, and there it was." The orchard that Tom is prowling is no beauty, no Maine apple orchard, more like scrubland, because of the way Michaels allows the trees to develop. Beneath a great many of those stunted specimens are tiny orange flags poking out of the ground. They mark the spots where Tom has located truffles. Says Michaels, in praise, "Ninety-five percent of the time when Tom indicates that he's found a truffle, he's right."

Michaels tells about the time, a month back, when storm clouds started coming in, and Tom, seeming to sense the urgency, found five pounds of truffles in forty minutes. That's about $3,000. That's digging for dollars.

Soon the dog starts locating truffles, one of them a particularly sweet find because it comes from beneath a tree with no previous orange flags. "Lost its virginity," Michaels says. Suddenly Tom shoots out of the grove after a particularly wonderful prize: a rabbit. Say what you will about pigs, they don't do that.

After two hours of hunting, we leave for home with about two pounds of truffles, which to Michaels is a small haul, signifying that the season is winding down. He spins truffle tales, one about a ten-ounce behemoth, another about finding a cornucopia of "russet potatoes"—his term for the truffles of six to seven ounces that had been plentiful weeks earlier. The best day for him was December 21, 2008, when Tom located 24.2 pounds of truffles, worth more than $14,000. He says, "You can get 20,000 pounds of onions or 40,000 pounds of potatoes off an acre of land. At the truffle conversion rate [an estimate based on sunshine, rainfall, etc.], you should theoretically get a ton of truffles per year per acre. We're getting 1 percent of that. Isn't that pathetic?"

*****

i returned to New York with a tiny payload of truffles, each one packed in rice, sealed in its own plastic bag. Michaels had taken the two pounds collected with the help of Tom the truffle dog and spread them across his dining room table, first pushing aside the clutter—books on truffles, and the microscope he uses to study truffles. Then I got to hunt, pick through them the way a kid scrutinizes candy at a corner store.

Each truffle looked and smelled different. Some had claw marks from Tom, the equivalent of bird shot in a wild Scottish partridge and prized by some chefs as a sign of authenticity. Inasmuch as I had been on site, I required no such reassurance. I felt the truffles for firmness. I smelled them for sweetness. I rejected the muskier ones, preferring the fruitier smells. Between sniffs I breathed in ground coffee to refresh my nose.